Thursday, January 13, 2011

As Wikipedia celebrates its 10th birthday on Saturday, I have mixed feelings. Of course I hugely admire and support the spirit of freely sharing the encyclopaedic knowledge accumulating in Wikipedia, but on the other hand I am also trying to make a living from using my knowledge and writing skills, which means that I occasionally contribute to one of the competing traditional encyclopaedias, which are now finding it increasingly hard to sell the goods that Wikipedia offers for free, and thus have smaller budgets to pay contributors, and thus end up falling behind with the updating work, which happens much faster on Wikipedia anyway.

At the moment, I am not contributing to the English language edition of Wikipedia, as this would amount to biting one of the hands that feed me. I have created a small number of entries in the German edition though. If and when the hand mentioned above stops feeding me, I might write more for the English edition as well.